"MILESTONES" (1957)

The on-line music guide, www.allmusic.com, lists Charlie Parker as having recorded "Milestones." This may cause some jazz fans to do a double take, since Parker died in 1955 and Miles Davis wrote the song in 1957. However, the answer is simple: there are two songs with the title "Milestones." The Davis composition was the second song with that title; pianist and friend of Davis, John Lewis, wrote the first in 1947. Lewis wrote "Milestones" for Davis in gratitude for introducing him to Charlie Parker and including him in Davis’ first recording session as a leader. At that session his "Milestones" was recorded for the Savoy Record label with Charlie Parker serving as a sideman. Gary Giddens in Visions of Jazz: The First Century described the Lewis composition as "…a line with so many harmonic bottlenecks that Parker insisted he’d play just the bridge because the tune was too hard for a country boy like him."

Ten years later Davis wrote his own composition, originally entitled "Miles," that became the title track for the Milestones album he recorded in 1958 on the Columbia Record label with his sextet that included Cannonball Adderley on alto saxophone, John Coltrane on tenor saxophone, Red Garland on piano, Paul Chambers on bass and Philly Jo Jones on drums. This "Milestones" was very different from the Lewis bebop tune and from other songs on the album. Andy Herman at www.PopMatters.com describes the title track as "…Davis’ first real attempt to write in the "Modal" style, basically abandoning conventional jazz and blues chord progressions in favor of songs built around a series of tones or scales that give the soloist greater freedom to improvise. "Milestones" only hints at the incredible depths this style of songwriting would open for Davis and his sidemen on later recordings, but it’s still by far the album’s most memorable track, bringing out each soloist’s personality—the cheerfully melodic Adderley, the thoughtful, measured Davis, and the fiesty, garrulous ‘Trane—more distinctly than any other song in the set." At the time, Davis told his band members, "There will be fewer chords, but infinite possibilities as to what to do with them."

George Russell, a jazz pianist/drummer, bandleader, theorist and composer, was a friend of Davis and a key influence on Davis’ exploration of modal jazz. In 1953 Russell published his book Lydian Chromatic Concept of Tonal Organization, one of the first formal theoretical works published by a jazz musician, and it became widely adopted. In modal jazz, improvisation is based on modal scales rather than chord progressions. Historically, bebop and hard bop musicians had used chords to provide the background for solos. A song’s theme would introduce the chords to be used for solos, and then musicians would improvise on the theme over the same repeated chord progressions for the duration of the song. That style of improvisation became so dominant by the 1950s that at recording dates sidemen sometimes were given only a list of chords from which to play. The opportunities for innovative solos were limited to the set of chords. In modal jazz, musicians write songs using modal scales rather than chords. As long as musicians stay within the scale being used, they can improvise much more freely, not being limited to a set of chords.

Miles Davis also attributed his interest in modal jazz to watching a performance by the Ballet Africaine, a dance troupe from Guinea, when they were in New York City. At the time, his girlfriend and later wife, Frances Taylor, was a dancer and went to all the dance performances, including this one, and took Davis with her. He described the effect their music had on him: "And when I first heard them play the finger piano that night and sing this song with this other guy dancing, man, that was some powerful stuff. It was beautiful. And their rhythm! The rhythm of the dancers was something. I was counting off while I was watching them. …That’s the thing, that secret, inner thing that they had. It’s African. I knew I couldn’t do it from just watching them dance because I’m not African, but I loved what they were doing. I didn’t want to copy that, but I got a concept from it."

The improvisational possibilities of modal jazz fascinated Davis. In his book Miles: The Autobiography written with Quincy Troup, he said, "What I had learned about the modal form is that when you play this way, go in this direction, you can go on forever. You don’t have to worry about changes and shit like that. You can do more with the musical line. The challenge here, when you work in the modal way, is to see how inventive you can become melodically. It’s not like when you base stuff on chords, and you know at the end of thirty-two bars that the chords have run out and there’s nothing to do but repeat what you’ve done with the variations. I was moving away from that and into more melodic ways of doing things. And in the modal way I saw all kinds of possibilities."

Milestones was a transitional album, a compromise between the jazz of Davis’ past and the jazz of his future. Except for the title song, the other cuts on the album were aggressive, up-tempo bebop tunes. In A New History of Jazz, Alan Shipton states, "It was not by any means the first modal jazz record (Gillespie’s Cubana-Be/Cubana-Bop, also partly inspired – and – arranged – by Russell, probably deserves that honor) but it had a dramatic impact on the way that much jazz improvisation would develop thereafter, and paved the way for Davis’s subsequent Kind of Blue album, which forever defined the genre of modal jazz." The Kind of Blue album, based entirely on modal jazz, is known as one of the greatest jazz albums ever recorded. The Milestones album was the only one recorded with Davis’ original sextet. Shortly after completing the album, Davis replaced Red Garland and Philly Jo Jones, whose heroin addictions were causing them to be unreliable and unpredictable, with pianist Bill Evans and drummer Jimmy Cobb. Evans and Cobb joined original sextet members Coltrane, Adderley and Chambers on the Kind of Blue album.

Davis did not write lyrics for "Milestones" and the song usually is recorded as an instrumental. However, vocalist Mark Murphy recorded it with lyrics by Jim Britt and Giacomo Gates recorded it with his own lyrics. In addition to leading the way to the Kind of Blue album, "Milestones" influenced John Coltrane’s Love Supreme and Herbie Hancock’s Maiden Voyage albums.

Miles Davis didn't stop his musical experimentation with modal jazz. He went on to explore third stream, fusion, jazz-rock, funk and world music, incorporating electric and non-traditional instruments. In Davis’ own words, "Nothing is out of the question for me. I’m always thinking about creating. My future starts when I wake up in the morning and see the light…Then I’m grateful."